Gloria Anzaldua (1942-2004)

Latina studies in the late 20th century gained a refreshing radicalism with the rise of Chicana lesbian feminist Gloria Anzaldua.

Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which combines Spanish and English poetry, memoir, and historical analysis, has become a classic in Chicano border studies, feminist theory, gay and lesbian studies, and cultural studies.

"The actual physical borderland that I'm dealing with in this book is the Texas-U.S., Southwest/ Mexican border. The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands, and spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest. In fact the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy."

—Gloria Anzaldua. Second Edition, with a new introduction by Sonia Saldivar-Hull, author of Feminism on the Border, and an in-depth interview with Gloria Anzaldua.

sources:

http://www.classicdykes.com/gloria_anzaldua.htm